Friday, January 31, 2014

Though Epic has sold Gears of War and plans to continue to make games, they are also pushing to get the Unreal 4 Engine out to other companies. And thus stirring up more rumors that Epic is really focusing more on the software to create games and not so much the games themselves. Either way, the Unreal 4 Engine has been out for quite a while and developers are not taking advantage of it. Most point out that the engine was not made for the last-gen consoles, something that hundreds of millions of users will continue to utilize for years to come while until the PS4 and XboxOne are integrated into the day to day gaming world. Right now, only a handful of them own the new systems so it's silly for developers to use a new technology that won't work on the older (but still not that old) systems.

Because of this issue with the last gen consoles, obviously UE4 does not work cross-gen. Something made for the PS4 with the engine can't be transferred back to the PS3 with the same content. In essence, you'd have to make two separate games with different software to make the whole thing work out.

Which is why we haven't heard about many games working with UE4, but Epic believes by this Christamas we'll see more of those games come to light.

Gamble is so confidant in UE4, claiming that half of the games using the product are new IP's, that we'll be seeing new games around Christmas solely using the engine, that by first quarter 2015 we will get the Triple A products.

It's a lot to boast for a company that has made a load of changes over the past 2 years. Three of their biggest names have left to work on other projects or start new businesses. 40% of the company was sold to Chinese investor Tencent. Epic's one home game has been sold to Microsoft. And now they the company has a lot to answer for with it's future. We'll see what happens down the line, which will apparently be around the holidays this year and hopes that their big gamble will pay off.